The Passions of Emma

Born to a life of wealth and privilege in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island, Emma Tremayne's life is all mapped out for her--including her engagement to the town's most eligible bachelor. Emma's sheltered world is shattered, however, when she discovers the horrifying working conditions in her fiance's textile mill. And when she encounters Shay McKenna, a brave Irish revolutionary, she learns what it will take to defy society's conventions, and experience a love she never thought possible.

Amazon.com ReviewWith skill and beauty, Penelope Williamson conveys the power and poignancy of many kinds of love in this moving story of an all-consuming, forbidden passion between a high-society beauty from late-19th-century Rhode Island and the impoverished Irish revolutionary who is married to her new friend. Emma Tremayne, bound by duty in a luxurious, highly restricted world, unconsciously yearns for something more. Gradually she reaches out to a poor Irish woman, a pregnant millworker with a husband and two children, who is dying of consumption. In Bria McKenna, Emma finds a soul-deep friend who quietly transforms her, opening her eyes to new joys and possibilities. Observing Bria's rock-solid love for her husband Shay, Emma begins to find within her own heart a previously unknown capacity for passion and devotion. Yet Emma dares not reveal to Bria that she's fallen in love with Shay. Williamson captures this time and place, and these complex relationships, in vividly realized, highly visual scenes, creating a memorable novel of real and enduring characters, with language whose elegiac tone captures the fleeting beauty of life. --Ellen Edwards

From Library JournalBorn to luxury and privilege, beautiful Emma Tremayne knows that it is her duty to marry well, maintain her social position, and avoid scandal?all of which she fully intends to do. But the brutal death of a young boy in the mill belonging to her fiance affects her life in a way she never expected, and when the compelling Irish activist Shay McKenna comes into her life, nothing is ever the same again. Set in Victorian Rhode Island, this compelling novel hovers between fiction and romance and deftly draws the contrast between the worlds of the haves and have-nots. Williamson (The Outsider, S. S., 1996) lives in Mill Valley, Cal.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.